,
and conceited mode of writing, and even of the most contemptible
buffoonery. Pope asserts that he wrote both better and worse than any
other man. All the scenes and passages which did not square with the
littleness of his own taste, he wished to place to the account of
interpolating players; and he was on the right road, had his opinion
been taken, of giving us a miserable dole of a mangled Shakespeare. It
is, therefore, not to be wondered at if foreigners, with the exception
of the Germans latterly, have, in their ignorance of him, even
improved upon these opinions.[15] They speak in general of
Shakespeare's plays as monstrous productions, which could have been
given to the world only by a disordered imagination in a barbarous
age; and Voltaire crowns the whole with more than usual assurance
when he observes that _Hamlet_, the profound masterpiece of the
philosophical poet, "seems the work of a drunken savage." That
foreigners, and, in particular, Frenchmen, who ordinarily speak the
most strange language of antiquity and the middle ages, as if
cannibalism had been terminated in Europe only by Louis XIV., should
entertain this opinion of Shakespeare, might be pardonable; but that
Englishmen should join in calumniating that glorious epoch of their
history,[16] which laid the foundation of their national greatness, is
incomprehensible.

Shakespeare flourished and wrote in the last half of the reign of
Queen Elizabeth and first half of that of James I.; and, consequently,
under monarchs who were learned themselves and held literature in
honor. The policy of modern Europe, by which the relations of its
different states have been so variously interwoven with one another,
commenced a century before. The cause of the Protestants was decided
by the accession of Elizabeth to the throne; and the attachment to the
ancient belief cannot therefore be urged as a proof of the prevailing
darkness. Such was the zeal for the study of the ancients that even
court ladies, and the queen herself, were acquainted with Latin and
Greek, and taught even to speak the former--a degree of knowledge
which we should in vain seek for in the courts of Europe at the
present day. The trade and navigation which the English carried on
with all the four quarters of the world made them acquainted with the
customs and mental productions of other nations; and it would appear
that they were then more indulgent to foreign manners than they are
in the present